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Oral History Interview with Koka Booth, July 6, 2004. Interview K-0648. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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PEGGY VAN SCOYOC:

How do you plan for and stay ahead of the kind of growth that Cary has
experienced?

KOKA BOOTH:

I think by having a good staff, and Cary has always had a good young
staff, and having an outstanding manager such as Bill Coleman and Jim
Westbrook. You know the measures, and measuring items that you have to
keep in touch with to make sure that happens. For instance,
we're one of the safest cities in North Carolina. At the time
we had one police officer for every so many thousand people. You have to
watch that and if the numbers start changing, you have to change those
numbers. You build fire stations so that you can have response time of
so many minutes. If you don't have that response you need to
build a fire station. So those people are professional at advising you.
If you allow this to be built, allow this to happen, if the growth area
takes place here, these are the facilities required and this is what you
have to do. So I think that's the direction that good
management, and I think the Council management for doing this was just
an absolute wonderful way of running a city. For having a professional
person who is not political in his thinking, working with someone who
has to be political in his thinking working together, makes for a good
atmosphere. If you can go ahead and do this if you want to, but if you
do that next year you have to raise taxes. Or, you can do that if you
want to but next year you're not going to be able to build
that X facility that we need so badly. Or, if we don't build
this water treatment plant, you will have to stop something.

PEGGY VAN SCOYOC:

So the trade-offs had to be spelled out and analyzed

KOKA BOOTH:

in advance. We would go to a retreat and they told us that, if you stop
growth in Cary, or you reduce it to this percent… In
Colorado, Arizona, Florida, we can show you what happens when they jump
over those lines, those government lines. They will go to Holly Springs,
they will go to Apex, they will go
to… even go down to Johnson County, and you will still get
all the headaches you're going to have now with traffic and
everything. But you won't get any of the taxes. And
that's exactly what happened. We were told that ten years
before that happened. Yes. But you've got to believe what
professionals are telling you.